by Tim Murphy
“Sir, you really can’t be sleeping in front of the cathedral.”
“Why not, it’s not a public space?”
“Do you want me to call our homeless outreach for you, sir?” She was taking her cell phone out of her bag.
Hector laughed. “No, I’m not homeless. I live in New York.” He didn’t see the need to elaborate, so he lay down again and passed out. How much time passed before the same goddamn fat lady was shaking his shoulder? This time when he looked up, she was standing there with two guys, two more Honduran-looking guys with crew cuts.
“Sir, you want to come to the cathedral’s shelter for the night and have a meal and a shower and a cot?” one of the guys said.
Hector gathered lucidity for all of four seconds. He was currently in no position to figure out this mess with the vanished car, how to get back to Palm Springs.
“Sure, why not?” he told the guy, who helped him up. He got inside a minivan that drove for a few minutes on the freeway until it pulled off into a side street, next to a cinder-block building. There was a big room inside with another big old cross on the wall looking down on about fifty men, all of them black and Latino, crashed out on cots, some massed in a corner on old couches watching TV or playing cards. The place stank. As soon as he walked in, in his soiled, too-tight white jeans and tank top, they started jeering at him. “Faggot” this and “maricón” that. Hector was still so wasted, he didn’t much care.
“Come on, man, leave me alone,” he said wearily to one of the guys closest to him who tossed off a maricón. One of the worker guys walked him back to the showers, where he stripped off his grimy clothes and stood under the stream, lathering himself, relieved to be getting clean despite the starkness of the cinder-block stall. He realized he had left the rest of the Klonopin in the car and had his first frisson of worry over how he was going to start feeling when everything started wearing off. Couldn’t he already feel, standing here under the lukewarm stream of water, the first stabs of depression and anxiety that always came with the crash?
The staffer guy came back with a towel and a clean, used T-shirt and pair of jeans, so big for him he had to hold them up while he walked. A horrible, sinking sense of abjectness—one he could usually fuzz over and modulate after every drug run with a mix of Klonopin and sleep—started seeping in. The worker brought him to a cot with a thin, beat-up pillow, and he lay down on it fetally, wondering if it had bedbugs. Five minutes later, the worker brought him a bologna-and-cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread on a paper plate. He took one bite and realized he was ravenous, that the last thing he remembered consuming was a protein drink twenty-four hours ago. He finished the sandwich in about four bites and lay down and said his usual prayer for when he finally went to sleep during a crash: “Por favor, Dios, ayúdame a dormir esta noche.”
When he woke up—eleven hours later, according to the institutional black-and-white clock on the cinder-block wall—the dude on the cot next to him said, “Fuck, man, all you been doing is crying and screaming and tossing around in your sleep like a crazy motherfucker.”
Where was he? What was that smell? Bit by bit, his mind pieced the past few days back together. The lost car. The abandoned apartment in Palm Springs. He was in a fucking homeless shelter in Los Angeles? What was he wearing? He wanted to cry, but not in front of the dude on the next cot. He thought that he could kill himself, that the whole thing had just gone too far this time to try to piece things back together. But how would he do it? He didn’t have any drugs or pills to do it with. Should he just walk out in front of traffic?
Then the whole “Ysabel Mendes!” moment came back to him. Oh God, not that again. No, no, no. Please God, no. The fucking kid.
He lay there on his side, crushed by the depression of the crash. His mind kept sorting out that he could do three things. One, he could kill himself, but that would take some doing with no drugs or pills around—he’d have to leave the shelter and go out into the streets and figure it out. Two, he could just stay here. They had no ID for him; nobody would ever come looking for him. He had effectively cut himself off not just from New York City and everything that had ever happened there, but Palm Springs, the half-dozen or so guys he’d had to his friend’s apartment before he got the text from the kid. He could just stay here and be a bum and be taken care of at the lowest level—cot, shower, bologna sandwich—make peace with these fellow bums, maybe be brought into their card circle or TV clique.
But there was a third choice, motivated by a dim grain of recognition that, just maybe, because of all the people he had actually helped years before, he’d earned a crumb of credit to be helped in return. He lay there and mulled over that extremely alien thought for several minutes. It motivated him enough, finally, to sit—and oh, that was a miserable effort—then to stand, holding up the too-big jeans, and walk over to one of the staffer guys, who was watching a wrestling match with some of the dudes.
“Can you make a call for me?” he asked the staffer.
The staffer—not the same staffer as the night before, correct? He wasn’t sure—looked up at him disinterestedly. “You got somebody to come pick you up?”
Hector nodded yes; it seemed like the easiest answer. Slowly, apparently reluctantly, the staffer pulled a cell out of his pocket. “What’s the number?” he asked.
Hector didn’t know it, he realized. “I need you to call 411 for the number,” he said. “I know it’s listed.”
“Are you serious?” the staffer asked. Hector was sure now the guy wasn’t the fairly nice guy who’d brought him in here the night before. This guy seemed like a dick. “It’s like a dollar-fucking-ninety-nine a minute to call 411.”
Hector suddenly had a long view of just how much subjugating himself he was going to have to do to take this third choice rather than kill himself or simply say nothing and stay here and rot. Was it really worth it at this point?
“I know, sir, I’m sorry,” he made himself say. “But I really need this person and I forgot her number.”
The staffer rolled his eyes and dialed 411. He looked up at Hector. “What’s the name?”
“The last name is Heyman.” He spelled it out. “First name is Ava.” He also spelled it out. “New York, New York.”
“You gotta call New York?” the staffer asked, more pissed off every minute.
“That’s where I’m from,” Hector said. He started to cry. “That’s where I’m from.”
All the guys in the TV clique looked up at him. “What the fuck?” they said. “Why you crying, marica? It’s gonna be okay, don’t worry.”
“Okay, okay, relax,” the staffer said. He waited for several seconds. “Here, I got somebody here who needs to talk to you,” he finally said into the cell, handing it to Hector.
“Ava?” Hector said into the cell, walking away from the blare of the TV.
“Who is this?” she asked. Oh God, Hector thought, he hadn’t heard that rasp of a voice in a long time. He came extremely close to snapping the phone shut. He couldn’t do this, he told himself. He said nothing.
“Who is this?” Ava said again. “Emmy?”
“Ava, it’s Hector.”
Silence. Then: “Hector? Villanueva?”
“Yeah.”
Another beat. “I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”
“I need your help, Ava.” That was all he needed to hear himself say before the tears flowed again. He sat down on a chair and sobbed choking sobs into the phone.
“Hector, what’s wrong? Where are you?”
“In Los Angeles,” he said through his tears.
“In Los Angeles? Are you high?”
“I was.”
“Who was the other guy on the phone?”
“The guy working at the homeless shelter.”
“The homeless shelter? Hector, what is going on?”
“Will you help me get hom
e?” He was still sobbing.
There was silence on the other end of the line. Ava finally sighed again. “Of course I’ll help you get home.”
“Thank you, Ava. Thank you so much.”
“Let me get a pen and—put me back on with that other guy, okay?”
The staffer was already standing over Hector. He put a hand on Hector’s shoulder. “Gimme the phone, buddy, I’ll work it out,” he said.
Hector handed over the cell and put his face in both hands and wept into them. Parallel tracking hadn’t worked, he thought. Well, it hadn’t worked until 1994, 1995—saquinavir, indinavir, ritonavir—the names of the drugs that had meant everything to them, the ones that changed everything. And Ricky? Until he couldn’t talk anymore, he was obsessed with fucking Madonna! It was all mashing together in Hector’s head now. He’d had to bring Ricky the September issue of Vogue with Claudia Schiffer on the cover—an outsize tome that further weighed down Hector’s already overladen work bag, on perhaps the steamiest day of the late summer—because another stylist with whom Ricky had imagined himself in a bitter, unspoken rivalry had gotten to do Claudia’s hair color, and Ricky just had to see how it had come out.
“Ooh, thank you, thank you,” Ricky had cried from his hospital bed, grabbing for the magazine. “Let me see.” He’d appraised the cover shrewdly for a few seconds, then sighed and rolled his eyes. “This is horrible,” he’d finally pronounced. “Horrible. That color is so flat. No depth.”
Hector had laughed. “Are you relieved?”
Ricky had looked up and smiled coyly. “I most certainly am,” he’d drawled.
“I’m glad it makes you happy,” Hector had said. He really meant it, too. It wasn’t the spitefulness, Hector had believed, that had delighted Ricky, but the prospect of curling up with hundreds and hundreds of pages of hair, makeup, and clothes. Ricky could peruse and analyze fashion spreads with a minuteness that amazed Hector, pointing out the tiniest imperfection or oversight in an eyebrow, spotting the faintest telltale wig line that would be invisible to the layperson’s eye. Ricky had prided himself on his meticulous work, which he’d not properly been able to take part in for several months.
Then Hector, overcome with longing, had gently drawn the magazine from his hands.
“Hey!” protested Ricky. “What are you doing?”
“I need to lie down with you,” Hector said, pulling the curtain around the bed, taking off his boots, lowering the top of the bed with the control switch.
“This is my bed,” Ricky fake-protested. “It’s a very, very expensive bed.”
“Good thing you’re broke-ass enough that Medicaid’s paying for it, then,” Hector said. He shimmied in the bed under the sheet, put his arm around Ricky. He buried his mouth in Ricky’s neck; deep in his rib cage, he could feel his tears shuddering and he took a breath to quell them. “I don’t understand you, Ricky,” he whispered.
“Don’t squeeze too hard, it hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m cooperating with the regimens now,” Ricky said.
“I know,” Hector said. He knew the data too well, though. Ricky had lost about eighteen months of good preventive treatment with Bactrim, living in his crazy denial. That had put him so far along. The data wonk’s boyfriend who shunned treatment! They were talked about like a tragedy in the movement. Hector slid his hand down into the back of Ricky’s underpants, gently ran it over Ricky’s right butt cheek.
“Does that hurt?” he asked.
Ricky squirmed happily. “Noooo. Au contraire. Are you going to massage my butt?”
“Yes, I’m doing it right now.”
“Oooh, hot. Right here in the hospital. Scandalous.”
“It’s a therapeutic massage!”
“It certainly is.”
“I love you so much, Ricky,” Hector said.
“I love you, too, papi.”
“I hate when you call me that.”
Ricky laughed. “Well, I’ve called you that for eight years, I’m not going to stop now.”
“It’s racially offensive.”
Ricky laughed harder. “Oh shut up, you love to be the papi.”
Hector laughed. “You’re fucking crazy.”
They’d had exactly eight weeks left after that night. Hector calculated that with clarity, sitting in the cinder-block shelter. The staffer who’d been on the phone with Ava walked over to him.
“A woman named Kyla is going to come pick you up,” he said. “It’s a friend of your friend.”
Hector nodded. He had no idea who the woman was. He continued to sit there, beading together the months in a way he hadn’t in years. Twenty years ago! How 1992 bled into 1993. Awful fucking 1993. That was around the time he’d started the splinter group with Chris Condello and a few others and they’d taken shit for that from the main group, being called traitors. Then all those trips to D.C. They spent half that year, and 1994, too, in D.C., in meetings with FDA and HHS. That work saved him for a little while. The protease inhibitors—watching the protease inhibitors develop, 1994, 1995. He was already letting go of the work by 1996, 1997. He was celebrating—the work was done! The friends he’d barely seen the past few years were hitting the streets again, looking like something approaching normal. All their fucking credit-card debt, all the black humor about the credit-card sprees, and now they’d live to face the bills! The creepy viatical companies who’d bought all his friends’ life-insurance plans and now were making their sinister phone calls, asking, essentially, in the most roundabout, delicate way, “Why aren’t you dead yet?” The new drugs had foiled their ghoulish scheme! But still they kept calling. Hector chased the faces, the voices, the attitude, even the asses that reminded him of Ricky. So many new party drugs and a thumping sound system everywhere he went.
A woman walked into the shelter—attractive, faintly olive skin, slim, rich-looking, skinny black jeans, ballet flats, a white eyelet gypsy blouse, dark curly hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, a leather bag, big sunglasses, iPhone in hand. The catcalls instantly started. She seemed hesitant to venture farther into the room.
“That’s the woman for you,” the staffer said to Hector.
Hunh? Hector thought. Who was she? He ignored the jeers from the other guys in the room and walked toward her, mortified.
She took off her sunglasses. “You’re Hector, right?” She sounded nice enough, but unsure, wary. He nodded. “I’m Kyla.” She extended her hand, which he took. “I’m a friend of Ava’s and her daughter, Milly. You know, from the Christodora? I live here in L.A.”
It all kept coming back to that kid! he thought. A friend of the kid’s adopted mother. He nodded. “Thank you for coming to get me,” he managed to say.
The woman glanced around the room. “Are you ready to leave?” she asked.
Hector turned to the guy at the front desk.
“Nobody’s keeping you here,” he said.
“Thanks for everything,” Hector said.
“Good luck, buddy,” the staffer said, reaching under the desk to hand Hector a plastic bag. It contained the dirty clothes he’d peeled off before his cinder-block shower the day before. “Try to pull your shit together.”
Outside, the sun hit him like an angry blast. He put his hand over his eyes.
“I think I have another pair of sunglasses if you want them,” the woman said. She fumbled in her bag and pulled out another big, dark pair—ladies’, obviously. Hector took them, put them on gratefully. The woman giggled a little. “Very glamorous,” she said.
He barely smiled. They got in her VW and she put on the air-conditioning. “I would never do this usually, except Ava told me all about you,” she said.
Oh God, Hector thought. He could only imagine what that meant. “Thank you,” he said.
“Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“You’re a meth addict, right?”
God, it stung to hear himself called that by a total stranger, to know that was how old colleagues described him now, too. But he nodded.
“I’ll help you sort out your situation here and get back to New York, either way. But do you want to stop?”
“I wanna die,” he told her.
She sighed. “Well, so did I. I had a drug problem, too. Can I ask you one thing? Would you be willing to go to an AA meeting with me now?”
“I don’t have a drinking problem,” he said.
“There’s a lot of drug addicts there, too. There are meth heads.”
Meth heads! That was all she thought he was—how casually she said it! But, well, she was right. Hector felt a frisson of shame, like maybe he wasn’t supposed to have become a meth head. Maybe he was supposed to have dealt with loss the way other folks he knew had, with a certain amount of bitterness, defeat, and fatigue, but with dignity, staying in his post, remaining a responsible citizen, a helper of his community. The idea exhausted him and even bored him a little bit. But he also felt that perhaps he had exhausted the role of a meth head. Hector Villanueva, who had worked alongside Bill Clinton and David Kessler at FDA—a meth head! This woman had met him only minutes ago and it was clear she thought of him, first and foremost, as just that.
“Sure, I don’t mind going to the meeting,” Hector told her. His life was in shambles, he thought. Where else did he need to be?
“There’s one in West Hollywood in an hour. You want to get something to eat first?”
“Sure.”
She drove to a Koo Koo Roo, a fast-food rotisserie-chicken place, on Santa Monica Boulevard. There were lots of young gay guys inside, all in tight tank tops and shorts, toting gym bags. Hector knew he looked like a homeless person in his oversize old T-shirt and jeans, his motorcycle boots, but he didn’t much care. At least he told himself as much. The woman ordered an unsweetened iced tea and a salad.